The rules here are: you have to tell us your best guess, then we'll help. I can tell you further that people will want to know where it is from, and the sentence before and after, because no sentence has any meaning in isolation. That's especially true of quirky sentences like this one.

As exgerman already said, it's not possible to consider such a sentence in isolation. What is the whole text about? What does "sie" refer to? This would be important to know in order to give an accurate explanation.

(Literally, it would be something like: "They influence past times", but this does not make sense without a very specific context).